Why IT is like bloody great marine birds

Nick Carr's done with decimals this time. He's moving straight to lobbing large confusing nautical metaphors. In a round up of recent comments from Gartner's soiree and other digital mariner confabs...

None of this will come as much of a surprise to anyone who's been watching the recent behavior of top IT executives. IT has become an albatross for CIOs. Smart ones are trying hard to distance themselves from "the technology" in order to escape the dead end of the data center. The CIO role is being repositioned in various ways: It's not about IT anymore; it's about "innovation" or "change management" or "process design" or "collaboration" or ... well, anything but IT. A few days ago, I met a well-respected CIO at an event, and the first thing she told me when we started talking about IT was, "I don't really see myself as being an IT person."

I especially liked this

But it was what another IT director said that really summed up what's going on: "One of the first tests of a CIO is stick them in front of a broken PC and see if they can fix it. If they can they aren't a CIO ... We aren't about running tin anymore."

Dirty, dirty, bad bad silicon, shoo, away, go--and sin no more.

Does Carr's point really seem like a revelation to anyone? Everything, it seems to me, has a discernable pattern and rythmn. If we can't detect it, we're not looking with truly open eyes or listening with unbiased ears. Isn't this an old rime? When it comes to many of the vaunted sea-changes of business and technology, a frenetic mob of tumescent captains and thinkers ride the wave of this fad or that new fashion only to crash, like junkies who never learn, on the shores of that boring old unsexy unshiny whiny and hard to handle carbon mass called people.

RIP, the paperless office, bye-bye WebVan. Damn, why do these coffee houses keep coming back?!

Edison said his DC current-powered street lights would eliminate crime. Nope. People, in search of shortcuts, and therefore, crime, are still with us.

Crime. Shortcuts. Security. It all comes down to a certain kind of shrinkage and how you tackle the lure of placebo.

Security is a fine example. We get whole arkfuls of wonks and salespeople pitching swipecards, biometrics, facial recognition and what have you at various overwhelmed professionals sweating over business continuity. And those harried people buy, because Y2K is no more and Salhaddin is coming to EMP your datbase or your laser jets. Doom! Woe! Discontinuity!

Doom? Absotively. Must be. Has to. We know this because business writers get their serial ideas from watching Kiefer Sutherland, not by reading Daniel Goleman or Csikszentmihalyi. (Words are so passe.) And you know this because the boss doesn't believe a thing is proof of serious effort or commitment unless its delivered by the crate to your loading dock. Then we implement said "protective" gantlet. Then somebody notices the place just ain't the same anymore and R&D doesn't seem to communicate with marketing because, well, because now there's a Logan's Run phalanx of swiping and optics and vaguely menacing prefects-with-attitude giving everybody indigestion and a sore neck. And dammit, tell those smokers to stop propping the door open!

On the whole, the tech did one thing really well (besides giving many another reason to log more hours surfing at their desks.)

The technology said: if it pings, or squawks, or logs, it's more important than you.

Mr. CIO, that's not an eagle circling up there. Which brings us back to Carr's IT "Albatross." But what's he really saying?

Samuel Coleridge's metaphor derives from the slaying of the actual thing in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It's one of those poems that reads like C++ does to supermodels, although it does have the nifty hook of our roving Mariner buttonholing a fellow wedding guest with his tale. Mythologized by ocean-faring types, the albatross was presumed to embody the souls of lost sailors and, so, very bad mojo be on those who slew one. (Okay, sailors killed and ate them when necessary but we won't let that get in the way of a good piece of lore.) Conversely, the sighting of an albatross was a good omen. This one led the Mariner and his men to safety out of a fierce squall and through snow-fog down Antarctica way.

Then, because he had a kewl piece of hardware called a crossbow, the Mariner shot the bird.

Not much explanation of the deed beyond the fact that he could do it and he did. At first, the men are shocked. But, slowly, realizing who signs their checks, they begin to soften and rationalize--plenty of albatross where that one came from, yeah? And look at all this fog! That damn bird must have brought fog. Dirty bird. Then things go bad. The fog departs. So does the wind. The men are adrift. Things get worse. The mariner is given the albatross to wear. Very woe-ish.

But, oddly, the CEO Mariner and crew are visited by 2 spirits and their freaky skeleton boats. Coleridge called the spirits Death, and Life-in-Death. We shall call them Off and On/Off.

The mariner's men are aghast and fearful, but near death. After a bit of dice, On/Off wins their souls. And one by one, they switch to On/Off; lifelike, eyes open, preserved and seemingly operable, but still dead and looking up at him from the deck. Our man is bummed. Woe! Doom! Discontinuity!

Time for a prayer.

He looks up and what does he see but the moon and the stars. "Those are nicely done," thinks he. Glorious. By moonlight, he observes various and sundry creatures of the sea. Snakes that shimmy and shimmer. Schools that dart and play. He sees freedom and flow. He likes. And suddenly he's verklempt. O' beauty and glory of simplicity and happy living things; of living and let live. The Mariner says "a spring of love gushed" from his heart. It was probably just the rain. A storm appeared and saved him from shrivellation and total Off-ness. With an epiphany and a nice shower he's full On.

Our spirit, On/Off, decides to get with the spirit-stuff and inspires (old definition) the boys who get up and man their stations. On a still-windless sea. No matter. There be spirits on the job. The ship takes off like a masty Cigarette for the North, powered by Off & On/Off's paranormal strategic alliance, Polar Spirit and a few ghosty friends. Coming out of the hole, our boy is caught flat-footed, loses balance and hits the deck, rendered unconsious.

He awakes to Polar and Pals talking shop. He's being reviewed:

"Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low  400
The harmless Albatross.

The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow."

The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do."

Relatively speaking, it's a light pennance more. Mostly baleful looks and some uncomfortable shuffling by our still On/Off crew, reminiscent, perhaps, of a Whiffle Ball. As we wind up our story of Ghosts and The Machine, the mariner's ship is supernaturally propulsed back to his home country. As he approaches the harbour, a chastened and wiser man turns and receives his parting gift. Above each dead sailor he sees their benign spirit freed, waving serenely back at him as they pirouette off into space. Phew--dead men can't talk and all dogs and wronged sailors go to heaven.

Just for exclamatory effect, Coleridge has our hapless Horatio rescued by a harbour pilot's skiff just as his ship and crew sink to a watery repose. Mmmm, cleansing. A completely zeroed and reinitialized Mariner, with a notable difference. This time, he's on a mission to share his epiphany.

This time, he's Linux.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell  610
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest  620
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

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